


I'll tell you just what I've seen

by astudyinpanda



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alcohol, Angst, Czerka Arms, Don't copy to another site, Evil Corporations, Gen, Prequel, Songfic, labor dispute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23506174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyinpanda/pseuds/astudyinpanda
Summary: In “the good old days,” Din gets drunk and agrees to help disgruntled Czerka Arms employees strike for more equitable wages. It's a tragedy waiting to happen.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	I'll tell you just what I've seen

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by and includes lyrics from [“Raise Up Your Weary Hands” by The Builders and the Butchers](https://youtu.be/qshka_Up9TY).

At any other seedy bar in any other backwater planet's single spaceport town, Din would've kept his mouth shut and drank his fill and left alone. But this was Adaask, where Xi'an and Qin had wandered off to find an even seedier venue where Din didn't want to be. And with a flexible length of hosing from his in-helmet hydration kit, Din had beaten Qin in a drinking contest right before they left. _Chakaare,_ both of them.

 _Blood splashed on a freighter's metal bulkhead. Blood in the aquarium. The fish drowned in it._ Today's job had gone sideways the way only Xi'an could twist it.

"I'm telling you, we're raising the flag of war, tonight, Mando," said a Britarro with green smoke curling out her narrow nostrils from a hand-rolled cigarette that dangled from the corner of her mouth. She stank like a burnt _uj'alayi_ and she was sitting too close to him at the bar, but it was crowded and the place wasn't that big to begin with. "Can you imagine those Czerka Corp faces if you came walking up to the garage with us?"

Din should've just kept listening, but… "Yeah, I can imagine it. They'll laugh. Your flag's made of flimsi and your army's what, half a clutch of Ssori and you? And the rest of the clutch wears Czerka yellow, don't they." The sixteen Ssori spread around three little round tables had been watching the Britarro with worry in their pale yellow eyes since she'd sat down beside Din. The Brittaro's face was breaking out in gold spots, which might've alarmed a person who hadn't just checked over his armor a couple hours ago. "One Mandalorian isn't going to turn the odds in your favor. Stay here," Din told her. "Keep drinking. Live."

"There's more of us, actually," the Britarro growled. The Ssori running the bar tipped his head back a bit, a sign of fright, and found something to do at the far end of the bar. "That's why I can pay you. And I _can_ pay you. All we need your help with is holding that garage until the others come to back us up. Once they get there, I pay you, you leave, and we hold until Czerka agrees to pay us what we're worth. All of us, not just the ones who look kind of human," she added a little louder. The Ssori chittered in a way that reminded Din of applause. "Now, you in?"

The Britarro's mug contained the cheapest beverage the bar sold. "So, what, you took up a collection?" Din asked.

The Britarro leaned in, her shoulder against his. The gold spots on her face had faded into her skin's natural teal. "We have a backer," she whispered. "We're going to come out on top and they know it. Tell me you're in."

And, before he'd thought it through, they were haggling over the price. He discounted his opening bid to account for his inebriated state. She offered a lower counter, but she didn't drop low enough to convince him she'd really pay at the end of the night. "If you don't tell me who your backer is, I'm not going," Din said.

The Britarro rolled her eyes in a slightly mechanical manner. She must've figured him for a human and thought a human gesture would convey her meaning more clearly than one of her own. "Alright, alright, it's Karflo Corp. Don't tell anyone. Bad for morale."

"No kidding." That drilling corporation would love to take over materials extraction on Adaask, which might happen if Czerka lost enough profit to worker salaries. And Karflo would destroy their workers and the land as viciously as Czerka did. There was a Mando'a saying that described the position this Britarro had put herself in. Alcohol made it a struggle to translate. "When you make fire with the Devil, don't be surprised if you get burned."

The Britarro squinted at him, then relaxed as she apparently decided she didn't need to know what that meant. "Yeah, I think I get it. I'm being careful. Ran the contract by three lawyers. Now, Mando, you've gotta tell me you're in."

"What's your name?"

"Loga Harakke."

"I'm in until dawn, for the price we agreed on, paid then or when your allies show, whichever comes first." If Din stayed out any longer, the damn Twi'lek siblings would leave without him.

Loga wiped sweat off her hairless scalp and grinned. "Alright! Glad to have you. Now we've got an hour before the workers in the garage are ready for us, so." She took another drag on the burnt _uj'alayi_ cigarette. "You must've seen some things worth talking about in your travels, Mando. Tell me about one?"

Death and fire swam through his mind on the high alcohol tide. "I've seen kids screaming while their fathers and mothers were shot dead in the streets. Do you have kids, Loga?" Not that he really wanted to know. "Still time to stay here."

She looked away while she took a longer drag on her cigarette. "Never mind about your stories."

  


Din deepened his usual swagger as Loga's revolutionary parade went on. He was leading the damn thing. Stumbling around the dirt road they walked down would've ruined the intimidating image Loga had hired him to portray.

Behind him walked Loga, wearing what looked like a Czerka fire protection suit painted in Adaask planetary colors instead of Czerka yellow. The sixteen Ssori from the bar scuttled along in similar gear. Noone had said anything about the garage being lit on fire, by Czerka or Loga's allies. What did they think the fire protection suits would do? They wouldn't stop a blaster bolt.

More yellow Ssori eyes watched from the windows of ferrocrete Czerka employee tenements that lined the street. The top of the lowest floor's windows only came up to his breastplate, so Czerka must've built the buildings with Ssori's diminutive height in mind. If this wasn't the Ssori planet of origin, Czerka had populated it to remind them of home.

Helmet sensors highlighted the garage's exterior cameras, which Din had missed on his visual scan. He threw Czerka's cameras a sloppy salute. The Ssori behind him, and some of the ones in the building, responded with a high-pitched cheer. That was depressing. He was not looking forward to seeing what these little beings looked like dead.

The rest of the night went about as he'd predicted. The garage staff was mostly Ssori too, although a few other species joined them in stripping off their yellow Czerka jumpsuits for the fire-resistant gear they seemed to think would keep them safe. Five minutes later, at least a hundred Czerka security rolled up in real armor and real armored vehicles, which of course had been kept in a security-only garage somewhere else. A lot of the security officers were Ssori too.

Demands were shouted. Counter demands, also shouted. Some of it was in Ssori, the translation of which jittered around in Din's ears. He stood out in the open looking formidable, concentrating hard on his balance to stop himself from weaving on his feet.

A security puke with more markings on his armor than the other security pukes brandished his weapon first. While the rest of the security force drew down on the garage, the garage crew waved around their second-hand blasters. Loga's allies did not show. The security puke opened up on the garage crew, who discovered that a firefight is different than fighting a fire.

As blaster bolts screamed into the garage, Din stumbled into cover behind a mining rig. He took out five security people on principle, with shots to unconventional parts of their bodies hit while he was aiming for neural and cardiac centers. When he found himself standing out of cover a moment later he thought he'd staggered out into the open by himself, until he registered that the rig was crawling toward the back of the garage while bleating in Droid.

Typical droid cowardice. He ran after the mining droid to put it between him and Czerka security before his armor acquired any more scorch marks. He should never have taken this job, and he definitely shouldn't have taken it tonight. If anybody back on Nevarro saw him on camera missing two shots to every hit, he'd be laughed out of the system.

After long minutes of ozone-scented carnage and red blaster bolts thick in the air, the security puke who'd started the bloodshed yelled at the survivors, "Raise your hands, come out now, and you won't be harmed."

Loga stood among them, cradling hands blackened by blaster fire against her chest. The fire resistant gloves she wore had fused with her skin. She was sobbing with the pain, and that was too hard to watch, in Din's current state. When she stepped out to join her surrendering brethren, Din gripped her upper arm between burn marks. "Payment first."

"Oh, go to hell," Loga moaned.

"Or we could get out of here."

Loga looked between her arrested coworkers and Din. She nodded. Din found them a back exit that wasn't welded shut and lunged at the four Czerka security guards on the other side. Standing over the mess he'd made of them, he accepted Loga's payment. The price of his dubious services would pay tonight's bar tab.

"It… didn't work." Loga trembled in the cool night air despite her layers of "protective" gear, watching Czerka security round up her fellow revolutionaries.

He looked pointedly between her hands and the dead in front of the garage. Tiny Ssori bodies lay in security spotlights, as pitiful as he'd expected. "Just remember that you're one of the lucky ones. Contract the support you need first, next time. Get someone other than a bounty hunter who's been drinking all night."

In the first real surprise of the night, Loga met his gaze and nodded like she would do this again. Maybe Czerka's days on this planet were numbered after all.

Din staggered back to the bar to pay a tab the shocked bartender must've expected to go without. Despite a temptation to drink more and wash that botched workers' rebellion out of his head, he lurched into the alleys he'd wind through to meet Xi'an and Qin. The artificial lights hid the stars, but they were up there, burning, and they would be no matter what corporation ran this hunk of rock.

Loga had gotten lucky once. Din let himself believe that she'd get luckier next time.

**Author's Note:**

> Mando'a terms:
> 
> Chakaare - Literally, "grave robbers"; a general term of abuse  
> Uj'alayi - a sweet cake


End file.
